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It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has always be

It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has always been the plan, it hasn’t been hidden, corporate media has just succeeded in sanewashing it for decades. Abdication of journalistic responsibility in the name of profits has allowed construction of alternate realities for so many people that these atrocities are now possible with few noticing.

MSFT_Edging 1y ago
I think it's because we've gotten so used to avoiding political speech as a method of "civility", we've collectively put our heads in the sand. The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  "Please avoid political speech" is often just shorthand for "you are not allowed to talk about how the current rules just so happen to be my rules".
  - foogazi 1y ago
    Flagged!
    - sethammons 1y ago
      And this post was flagged and is no longer on hn front page
      - tempodox 1y ago
        It is in https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active.
  - MSFT_Edging 1y ago
    It's easy to forget the Hacker website is actually just a VC discussion board and the "avoid politics" is simply "avoid talking about our future business lines"
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      Haha, yes. I meant more in general discourse though. Maybe HN should shift to "how to prosper in a dictatorship". :)
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  I was just too young and things exploded by the time I really could start to understand what was gonig on. I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit. The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.
  - soraminazuki 1y ago
    I guess we grew up in the same era, but I couldn't disagree more about any administration giving hopes. While Obama mostly didn't make things dramatically worse, he did keep the status quo and all the troubling policies that came with it. Refusing to prosecute Bush-era crimes? Check. Keeping Guantanamo? Check. Expanding illegal mass-surveillance systems? Check. Expanding military drone programs and extrajudicially killing civilians outside of war zones? Check. Breaking the record on whistleblower prosecutions? Check. That's in stark contrast to the leniency given to those who caused the financial crisis. On the positive side, I guess he tried to fix healthcare, but it's still broken as ever. It was so bad that it's unbelievable that subsequent administrations managed to make matters even more astronomically worse.
    - antisthenes 1y ago
      > I guess he tried to fix healthcare Yeah, he tried, but anyone with working brain cells could tell you that ACA was just going to end up in a bigger payout to the healthcare industry. It was a status quo pro-corporate bill just like the rest of his centrist policies. The actual solution has and always will be to reduce costs, which means people losing jobs and hospital admins not owning 3 vacation homes.
    - 1y ago
lapcat 1y ago
> It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has been happening long before W, and the Democrats are complicit too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
- piva00 1y ago
  It might take a couple more generations, a lot more misery, and maybe even a complete breakdown of democracy in the USA, for its population to finally learn that Democrats or Republicans are bound to the same higher power in the USA: money. Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    How convenient that you have an argument for lumping together both a party that wants to continue the liberal democracy and a party that wants to cling to power at the expense of creating an actual authoritarian state complete with a secret police.
    - lapcat 1y ago
      The two parties are not the same, but the privately funded electoral system of the US applies to all parties. Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money. Consider, as a revealing example, the Patriot Act of 2001. There was more resisitance to it from Democrats than from Republicans, yet there was still not nearly enough resistance. In the Senate, the vote was 98-1, with only Democrat Russ Feingold against. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act?#Legislative_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act?#Legislative_histo... In my "free speech zone" link above, the Democrats were the first to use that blatant violation of free speech, at their national convention. Republicans take advantage of the precedents set by both parties.
glenstein 1y ago
The only part I would disagree with here is that there was a plan dating back to the George W. Bush Admin. I think "the plan" in earnest came into being between 2020 and 2024, and I don't think anyone from the Bush years would find a home in the party let alone the current administration. It's not that they had no plans necessarily, they just weren't the ones in charge anymore. I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.
- Herring 1y ago
  I don't like putting the blame on a "plan". Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and the US has had a strong anti-democratic strain since slavery. Probably even feudalism before that. Once you see it, you see it everywhere and can't unsee it. There's a reason Trump's best polling issue is immigration https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
- JeremyNT 1y ago
  Yeah viewing it as a single plan is wrong. I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint"). Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants. It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!
yubblegum 1y ago
> This has always been the plan This implies a (bipartisan) conspiracy to agitprop the nation into violent division as pretext.
- tremon 1y ago
  Why does it imply that? You only need one side to consistently antagonize the other and turn everything into us-vs-them rhetoric. The other side can either choose to ignore it, try to maintain higher-level discourse, or start playing the same game; the end result is still the same. I don't see why a bipartisan conspiracy would be required.

MSFT_Edging 1y ago

I think it's because we've gotten so used to avoiding political speech as a method of "civility", we've collectively put our heads in the sand. The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.

actionfromafar 1y ago
"Please avoid political speech" is often just shorthand for "you are not allowed to talk about how the current rules just so happen to be my rules".
- foogazi 1y ago
  Flagged!
  - sethammons 1y ago
    And this post was flagged and is no longer on hn front page
    - tempodox 1y ago
      It is in https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active.
- MSFT_Edging 1y ago
  It's easy to forget the Hacker website is actually just a VC discussion board and the "avoid politics" is simply "avoid talking about our future business lines"
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Haha, yes. I meant more in general discourse though. Maybe HN should shift to "how to prosper in a dictatorship". :)
johnnyanmac 1y ago
I was just too young and things exploded by the time I really could start to understand what was gonig on. I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit. The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.
- soraminazuki 1y ago
  I guess we grew up in the same era, but I couldn't disagree more about any administration giving hopes. While Obama mostly didn't make things dramatically worse, he did keep the status quo and all the troubling policies that came with it. Refusing to prosecute Bush-era crimes? Check. Keeping Guantanamo? Check. Expanding illegal mass-surveillance systems? Check. Expanding military drone programs and extrajudicially killing civilians outside of war zones? Check. Breaking the record on whistleblower prosecutions? Check. That's in stark contrast to the leniency given to those who caused the financial crisis. On the positive side, I guess he tried to fix healthcare, but it's still broken as ever. It was so bad that it's unbelievable that subsequent administrations managed to make matters even more astronomically worse.
  - antisthenes 1y ago
    > I guess he tried to fix healthcare Yeah, he tried, but anyone with working brain cells could tell you that ACA was just going to end up in a bigger payout to the healthcare industry. It was a status quo pro-corporate bill just like the rest of his centrist policies. The actual solution has and always will be to reduce costs, which means people losing jobs and hospital admins not owning 3 vacation homes.
  - 1y ago

lapcat 1y ago

> It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has been happening long before W, and the Democrats are complicit too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone

piva00 1y ago
It might take a couple more generations, a lot more misery, and maybe even a complete breakdown of democracy in the USA, for its population to finally learn that Democrats or Republicans are bound to the same higher power in the USA: money. Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either party will always look out for the moneyed interests, anything else they might champion for is just there to give a veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's the foundation of American democracy, donations, aggressive lobbying, business-first mentality, the votes are there just to decide which side of the coin will move these interests forward, not to decide what platform is best for the citizenry in general.
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  How convenient that you have an argument for lumping together both a party that wants to continue the liberal democracy and a party that wants to cling to power at the expense of creating an actual authoritarian state complete with a secret police.
  - lapcat 1y ago
    The two parties are not the same, but the privately funded electoral system of the US applies to all parties. Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money. Consider, as a revealing example, the Patriot Act of 2001. There was more resisitance to it from Democrats than from Republicans, yet there was still not nearly enough resistance. In the Senate, the vote was 98-1, with only Democrat Russ Feingold against. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act?#Legislative_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act?#Legislative_histo... In my "free speech zone" link above, the Democrats were the first to use that blatant violation of free speech, at their national convention. Republicans take advantage of the precedents set by both parties.

glenstein 1y ago

The only part I would disagree with here is that there was a plan dating back to the George W. Bush Admin. I think "the plan" in earnest came into being between 2020 and 2024, and I don't think anyone from the Bush years would find a home in the party let alone the current administration. It's not that they had no plans necessarily, they just weren't the ones in charge anymore. I do think the Bush years were the first major destabilization of rule of law domestically that helped create conditions for today, along with Obama's "look forward, not backward" enshrinement of it as bipartisan consensus. Bush also normalized a kind of partisan unresponsiveness to mass democratic uprisings that people used to believe were capable of influencing the government.

Herring 1y ago
I don't like putting the blame on a "plan". Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and the US has had a strong anti-democratic strain since slavery. Probably even feudalism before that. Once you see it, you see it everywhere and can't unsee it. There's a reason Trump's best polling issue is immigration https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
JeremyNT 1y ago
Yeah viewing it as a single plan is wrong. I think the more complete view is that the current generation of fascists learned from the Bush admin's mistakes (or, I suppose you could say, they feel unshackled by Bush era "restraint"). Combined with a cult of personality frontman to distract, aided by a captured media ecosystem and a radicalized judiciary, they are empowered to build on the shoulders of giants. It was not self evident in the 00's that we would end up with Miller/Vought running the show - the actual form could have been something completely different. Indeed, Rove himself recently popped back up to chastise them!

yubblegum 1y ago

> This has always been the plan This implies a (bipartisan) conspiracy to agitprop the nation into violent division as pretext.

tremon 1y ago
Why does it imply that? You only need one side to consistently antagonize the other and turn everything into us-vs-them rhetoric. The other side can either choose to ignore it, try to maintain higher-level discourse, or start playing the same game; the end result is still the same. I don't see why a bipartisan conspiracy would be required.